Exotic fusion food recipes

March 3, 2016

Sago Pudding with Gula Malaka ( Palm Sugar)

A simple dessert for your sweet tooth.. It is tasty, light and most importantly it requires minimum effort to make. This dessert is of Nonya origin. Nonya cuisine comes from the Peranakans, descendants of early Chinese migrants who settled in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Nonya cooking is the result of blending Chinese ingredients with various distinct spices and cooking techniques used by the Malay/Indonesian community, which I find very similar to Malayalee cuisine, except for some ingredients like the pandan leaves, laksa leaves, belachan and kepayang. The technique used is also very similar. The extensive use of wrapping food for steaming with banana leaves reminds you of various types of Ada made in Kerala.

Here I’ve entirely changed the flavour of the dish by adding cardamom instead of pandan leaves. Pandan leaves once cooked have a very distinctive smell, which took me around 10 years to start liking it. But I still prefer cardamom to pandan leaves . Since I’ve added cardamom, the dish taste like a deconstructed sago payasam.